My daily readings 12/23/2010

Eliot scholars went nuts. They scoured his prepublication manuscripts trying to figure out which of its five parts were written first, how they were arranged into a coherent whole, even what Eliot was reading while he wrote them. To help with the chronology they conducted an almost forensics-level analysis of his typewriters. They discovered — among many other ridiculous things — that one model he used produced letters 0.02mm wider than the other, a minute detail which went a long way toward dating his many drafts.